LIFE IN BALANCE Part 1. What Is health?
by Elena Greco
LIFE IN BALANCE is a multi-part series exploring health–what it is, how to get it and how to maintain it, easily and naturally.
This article is published on MEDIUM: Life in Balance: Part 1.
Read other parts of the series here: Life in Balance.
Typical reading time: 3 minutes Part 1. What is health? I want to start by asking a question: What is health? Sometimes asking the right question is the key to getting the right answer. First, a disclaimer: I’m not a licensed health professional, such as medical doctor or a naturopath. So in case you’re wondering why I’m in a position to speak about health—or how I happened to become an integrative holistic coach, healer and counselor with a life-long fascination in the human body-mind—I’ll begin at the beginning. Many people in my mother’s family were in medicine. In my early years, I spent summers with my maternal grandparents. Sometimes my grandmother, who was a nurse who sometimes worked for my cousin, a doctor, would take me to work with her—a great treat! Sometimes he took me with him to see patients. He had a big, wooden chair in his office that swirled round and round (I got to spin!), and lots of medical books filled with fascinating pictures. I loved to read from an early age, and my grandmother had medical books at home, too, which I skimmed at every opportunity. Granted, I couldn’t understand everything I read, but I grasped enough to be intrigued. So I developed an interest in the human body early on. I took Biology and Human Biology in both middle and secondary school because I loved biology. In high school I became passionately interested in psychology, and in college I developed an interest in nutrition; herbology was a natural transition from there. In the eighties I explored consciousness and how that related to the mind and body. I began studying several healing traditions other than the typical Western allopathic one, including naturopathic, homeopathic and Ayurvedic traditions, especially Ayurveda. I studied healing, consciousness and transformation with a former colleague of Timothy Leary and Stanislov Grof, Kamala Hope Campbell, and became certified in several healing techniques. (See more here.) When I say I studied, I mean I read everything I could get my hands on over a period of many years, from all points of view, trained with leading teachers, both individually and in workshops, and experimented on myself extensively. I’ve been a holistic healer, counselor, and group facilitator since the 1980s. I now practice as an integrative holistic life and creativity coach, and I recently expanded my practice to full time once again. What is health? To get back to the original question, as I said, I explored a lot of areas and studied several major schools of healing. The conclusion I came to is this: Health relies on balance. In essence, health IS balance. To remain in balance, we need to be able to adjust to the many fluctuations of life. As an example, if you’re out in the hot summer sun for too long, your body will experience symptoms such as sweating and thirst. The sweating cools the body, and the thirst prompts us to drink water to counteract what the body loses in sweating. Notice how these symptoms help the body maintain balance, as well as to give us a warning that we’re out of balance. Suppressing or ignoring those symptoms would ultimately result in a shut-down of physical functions and we would die. Health is not the absence of symptoms, because symptoms are often the body’s or the mind’s way of letting us know that things aren’t in balance so that we can address that imbalance before it becomes dangerous. Symptoms are helpful in maintaining health. An awful lot of what we call “healthcare” in our country is not about caring for our health, but about suppressing symptoms, the symptoms that warn us that we’re out of balance. In short, we sabotage nature’s primary healing mechanism. Also, health doesn’t mean you never get sick; it means you and your body are able to return to balance quickly. For example, maybe you get the flu. You’re pretty sick for a couple of days. Then you gradually start feeling better, and within a week you’re up and around again. You’re healthy, since your body was able to adapt to the virus and regain its equilibrium (another word for balance). On the other hand, say you get the flu, and you’re pretty sick for a couple of days. You continue to get sicker and sicker, and ten days later you end up in the hospital with a secondary infection. You’re not healthy, since your body was unable to regain its equilibrium. In the next segment we’ll explore this further and start to look at ways to return to balance or to maintain balance and to experience true health in our lives. I have an easy method—one that can accommodate all kinds of lifestyles, diets and preferences—that you can use to keep yourself in balance—that is, healthy. It might take a little while to get to the punch line, and I hope you’ll be patient and come along, as I’m sure you’ll find the end result beneficial. In the mean time, think about what health means to you, and whether you think you’re healthy. That’s your assignment!
Read other parts of the series here: Life in Balance.
See Elena’s bios for more information about the author.